Tagged: archaeology

This Saturday February 6th there’s a night of experimental/improv music at Vinyl Deptford, the record shop and coffee bar at 4 Tanners Hill,London, SE8: ‘a chance to to hear some rarely heard international musicians…

The draft proposal is woefully inadequate in that i) it devotes too much of its text to listing matters which have already come about or are well developed and little to a strategic vision for the city centre as a totality ii) it seems overly concerned with facilitating and promoting large scale developer-led projects which citizens are expected to welcome without hesitation and iii) it makes no mention of any resilience planning which, following recent flooding incidents on the Irwell is nothing short of property speculation induced folly. The city needs a comprehensive and genuinely visionary plan which deals with the disjunctions between the various districts the draft report discusses largely in isolation from each other. It also needs a strategy which connects the city centre with its suburbs, physically, socially and economically.

Developing a city requires a more sustainable basis than the inducing of a commercial property boom based on often fragile investment funds.

The dismal quality of the public realm projects the draft strategy praises suggests no awareness of the many global initiatives to create successful urban places, falling back on security as a precondition of access to the public realm, an issue clearly connected to the increase in licensed premises which the strategy also reports uncritically, making no mention of any consequent anti-social issues.

Despite Manchester’s continuing ability to generate good publicity, if this strategy is adopted unaltered, the underwhelming experience of new built environment projects will continue to puzzle and disappoint visitors and, more importantly, citizens, reducing aspirations and increasing alienation from the sort of civic values which should be fostered by our elected officials.

I well remember Mona Road in the mid-1950s. It was on my daily walk from Lausanne Road (no.7, since demolished), to Edmund Waller Primary School off Dennett’s Road and Walsham Road. The newsagent or ‘paper shop’ on the north side of Mona Road was a little over half way along it towards Dennett’s Road.

I don’t recall the proprietor’s name, but the entrance door was on the left, a large picture window to the right. The customer space inside was fairly small with the wooden counter of newspapers running back, on the right, from the window around in an L-shape to the rear. The interior was not too bright by today’s standards.

As it sold sweets and simple playthings the shop was of course popular with the neighbourhood’s schoolchildren. For example, the Jubbly orange drink came in a pyramidal cardboard carton; you tore off one corner to drink from it. In its optional frozen state, the orange colour drifted to one side, leaving the other as clear ice.

Luvly Jubbly . Among children’s fads of the time, were the Scoubidou plastic weaving kits. You braided and knotted various coloured strands into attractive combinations and forms.

Good for acquiring hand-eye coordination, dexterity, concentration, colour awareness, creativity and sense of achievement at low cost. The shop sold small reels of percussion caps which you would load into your toy sixshooter, or insert individually into the head of a streamlined plastic bomb device. World War II had only been over ten years.

Health and safety and political correctiveness had not yet dawned. For a while, I was an evening paper boy to earn pocket money. The Evening Standard (tabloid) and The Evening News (broadsheet) were the mainstays, with The Star (tabloid) somewhat waning.

Elsewhere in town, the typical corner news-vendor’s cry was Star, News, Standard! You packed your deliveries in a large linen shoulder bag. The newsagent didn’t mark up each paper, as you carried a listing of addresses on a cardboard sheet in the bag.

Soon, you learnt by heart which house took which paper, where the barking dogs lurked, the awkward letterboxes, the long front paths, the broken gates, the tatty doors and those nicely maintained. That particular round took me up Telegraph Hill as far as Kitto Road where, now and then, one householder might tip me 6d (sixpence): very nice of them. I didn’t deliver Sunday papers, although I remember the Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror ), Sunday Graphic , News of the World, Sunday Times and so on.

I’m sure the newsagent also sold cigarettes such as untipped Senior Service , Weights , Woodbines , etc, and tobacco (e.g. Old Holborn ) for pipe smokers and those who artfully rolled their own using Rizla cigarette papers (plain or liquorice flavour!) from the colourful packets. A few doors further along from the paper shop, on the corner of Mona Road and Dennett’s Road stood a baker’s shop.

As well as the usual bloomers, tin loaves and all the rest, various cakes were sold; my special favourite was their caraway seed ( seedy ) cake.

If memory serves, those were the only two shops in Mona Road; certainly the south side was Victorian terraced houses and much the same on the north side.